An aircraft refers to any piloted vehicle capable of flying at least within the Earth's atmosphere, such as an airplane or a helicopter.
It is often essential to use several calculating members each determining at least part of the path of the aircraft in many current aircraft. Among these calculating members, a flight management system makes it possible to determine the path of the aircraft from takeoff to landing. Determining such a path plays a strategic role, and in particular makes it possible to estimate the quantity of fuel necessary to reach the final destination, the time remaining to that destination, and many other parameters. This path is generally displayed on a dedicated display screen.
However, the path of the aircraft calculated by the flight management system generally does not include tactical maneuvers of the aircraft. Such tactical maneuvers are necessary in parts of the aircraft's mission where its path cannot be determined in advance.
An example of such parts of the mission in particular relate to locations with high air traffic where guiding of the aircraft is done directly by the crew of the aircraft using other calculating members, such as automatic pilot. Thus, the flight management system sends the order to the automatic pilot, which then calculates a new tactical path of the aircraft based on the instructions entered by the crew. This new path is displayed on the display screen of the automatic pilot and generally includes only the last instruction from the crew, typically to command the airplane in the lateral axis (roll, heading, land route instruction for example), in the vertical axis (vertical speed, pitch, engine thrust instruction, for example) and an horizontal axis (velocity instruction, for example).
The calculating and display of these different paths is not, however, optimal.